Turbo Express: A Loving Tribute

You Are Here: RetroMo Part 1: NEC Turbo Express
RetroMo Part 2: Sega Game Gear
RetroMo Part 3: Atari Lynx

My parents have always been a strong opponent of videogames. "They'll rot your brain!" "Your eyes are under too much strain!" "They're too violent!"

They're at times very annoying, not so much these days because I'm in my twenties and free to purchase whatever I want, but back in the day, when I was a kid, I could barely keep up with my friends. They were all playing Genesis and Super Nintendo, and I was stuck ("stuck") with an old NES. I can't say times were hard because I enjoyed titles such as Star Tropics and the disappointingly overlooked (but amazing) Clash at Demonhead, but I wanted better graphics and sound. I wanted Super Mario World, damnit!

Anyway, when I was about 12 I convinced my parents to support my decision to purchase a handheld videogame system. Note that I said the words "support my decision" instead of "buy me", because my mom and dad refused to spend a single dime on a videogame console. But I suppose they liked that I was going to work for it, so in theory, I was teaching myself a valuable lesson about money, even though I frequently pocketed change when they weren't looking. But for the most part, I earned about $220.00, quite a feat for a youngster who wasn't old enough to have a real job, but I was determined to break out of my personal NES hell (looking back, I realize that I was a moron).

I researched my purchase for several months, because during the early nineties there were four competitors in the handheld market. There was Nintendo's original Game Boy, which I had decided to exclude because it couldn't display colors, Atari's Lynx, which I sort of wanted but backed away from since it was losing support, Sega's Game Gear, which is what I wound up buying, and then there was NEC's Turbo Express.

At the time, the Turbo Express was the proverbial king of kings, a high class machine capable of amazing visuals. Not only was it (and still is) capable of displaying 482 simultaneous colors (from a palette of 512), but it also featured a high-resolution, active matrix backlit color LCD screen and TV tuner accessory (the Game Gear did as well), but the big kicker was that it played all of the TurboGrafx-16 HuCards, so you could pop out Bonk's Adventure from your TG16 and slap into your newfangled Turbo Express, which is something that at the time just hadn't been seen before, and come to think of it, it's quite a rarity today. Ah yes, and it had a sticker price that ranged from anywhere between $199 to $299, which only made it even more delicious, because I couldn't afford it.

Ultimately, I went with the Game Gear and it was a solid decision. NEC didn't last much longer in the videogame market, and the Turbo Express became extinct, but I never forgot about it, so a couple of years ago I scored a mint unit off Ebay and I've been beaming ever since. However, the Turbo Express, while cool, isn't exactly great technology today, or even back in the day. So let's take a detailed look at this hand held monster just to see what's up, as well as to highlight some of its best games.